Author: drjnsmith

The growing social pressure to address the climate emergency, as well as awareness of the already harmful impacts of climate disruption, are pushing organisational leaders to respond. But for many it will not be obvious how to respond, particularly when faced with a multitude of other pressures. This is my suggested list for key elements… Read More

I did this short article earlier this month for one of the local newspapers in Cambridge, the Cambridge Independent, about climate change as a health threat and the idea of adapting the Lancet Countdown for local use. Just an idea. I’d be interested to know what others think. Could this be useful?

This blog aims to summarise where we have got to with fossil fuel divestment in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, UK. It covers higher education, local government and the Divest Parliament campaigns. If I’ve missed stuff out please send a comment so I can update things. Anglia Ruskin University: They have signed the Fossil Free Declaration committing to… Read More

Our lives depend on the choices of the politicians who represent us. This is the harsh, and largely unrecognised, reality of politics and why our choices when we go out to vote are so important. The full spectrum of factors which determine our health (aka wellbeing) are complex and way beyond the control of any… Read More

Earlier this year as part of a work trip to Copenhagen I cycled around on a hire bike and got to understand a little of what makes the city work as a great place to cycle. The first thing you notice about Copenhagen is that there are people cycling everywhere. For those reading this in Cambridge… Read More

This week world leading scientists are gathering in Oxford to discuss the aspiration agreed in Paris of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. In this blog I am going to put aside what for me is the key question for the conference which is whether 1.5 degrees is conceivably possible without heroic assumptions about… Read More

This blog describes why I am running for a seat on the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) board . The FPH is the professional body for UK public health specialists. Elections are about to open for members to choose who sits on the board for the coming three years. Last week I retweeted a slide reporting that between 2002-2012 more than 3… Read More

How do you change a city to become zero carbon? How do you win a bike race? These two questions on the face of it have little in common. In early February I attended a talk in Cambridge by Dave Brailsford about how the cycling teams he has run have become among the most successful ever. He… Read More

Northern England flooded. More than 150,000 displaced by flooding in South America. New York recording temperatures of more than 20 degrees Celsius on Christmas Eve. Countries like Malawi running out of food due to previous drought. Record heat in Australia. What a December we had. Records seem to be falling all the time. But this… Read More

Yesterday Professor John Loughhead the Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change published a blog: ‘Securing the UK’s Energy Future: the role of gas’. Given it came so soon after COP21, the global climate change talks, my initial reaction was one of dismay. Natural gas is a fossil fuel so the… Read More